Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Updates on Occupy Protests Nationwide

After a night of violence in Oakland, Calif., where police officers fired tear gas at protesters affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement, The Lede is following the response of demonstrators in cities across the country on Wednesday.

To share links to eyewitness accounts, video or photographs of the protests, post a comment in the thread below or send a message on Twitter to @thelede.

In New York, protesters left their base in Zuccotti Park shortly after 9 p.m., to march in solidarity with the Oakland demonstrators in what became a two-hour game of cat and mouse. Police followed the Wall Street protesters as they walked, and sometimes ran, through the Financial District, City Hall, SoHo and the West Village, according to our colleague Colin Moynihan, who was on the scene. About a dozen people were arrested.

Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesThe police arrested an Occupy Wall Street protester during a demonstration in New York City.

At one point, the police stretched an orange net across West Street in downtown Manhattan, a tactic they have employed during past demonstrations, sometimes followed by mass arrests. Many of the protesters fled.

This video from NBC New York shows protesters streaming through the streets, past buses and taxis. About two minutes in, police scooters form a line across an intersection blocking the street, and a scuffle appears to break out.

By 11 p.m., the march was over and many people had returned to Zuccotti Park, where they were greeted by the shouts and cheers of those who had stayed behind.

A local ABC affiliate in San Francisco is live streaming aerial video of the protest in Oakland, which you can follow here. It shows that demonstrators have filed back into Frank Ogawa Plaza, across from Oakland’s City Hall. But our colleague Malia Wollan says the city does not plan to let them stay past 10 p.m.

Jim Wilson/The New York TimesMoises Montoya, a union member with Local 21 of the Professional and Technical Engineers delivered a message of congratulations and support for the Occupy Oakland cause after the fences came down around Frank Ogawa plaza.

Law enforcement officials in Oakland are allowing protesters back into Frank Ogawa Plaza, the site of intense clashes between police and demonstrators on Tuesday night, The Associated Press reported. But they will still be prohibited from staying there overnight.

From The A.P.:

Mayor Jean Quan announced the conciliatory gesture Wednesday, hours after officers in riot gear clashed with and fired tear gas at demonstrators who had tried to re-establish the disbanded camp.

Quan says Oakland supports the protesters’ goals, but had to act when a small number of them threw rocks, paint and bottles at the police.

A 24-year-old Iraq War veteran was critically injured by a projectile that struck him in the head during the chaotic conflict Tuesday night.

Police Chief Howard Jordan says an internal review board and local prosecutors have been asked to determine if officers on the scene used excessive force.

Our colleague Malia Wollan is stationed at 14th Street and Broadway in Oakland, on the corner of Frank Ogawa Plaza, where much of Tuesday night’s mayhem took place. She reports that the plaza is barricaded on all sides with metal fences, and that police officers and vehicles are parked inside.

But some protesters have taken to Twitter to say that they plan to “retake” the plaza at 6 p.m. local time. They appear to be spreading the word using the Twitter hashtag #retaketheplaza, Ms. Wollan added, “and many say they intend to do just that.”

On her own Twitter feed, which you can follow here, Ms. Wollan has posted that some protesters have returned to the area armed with gas masks and eye washes in case of a repeat of Tuesday night’s events.

“I’m coming more prepared for the tear gas this time,” Momo Aleamotua, 19, a student from Oakland who was arrested at the protest early Tuesday morning. Mr. Aleamotua said he fashioned a shield out of wood to protect himself, and bought 16 gas masks to distribute to other protesters.

Jay Finneburgh, via Indybay.orgScott Olsen, 24, an Iraq war veteran, suffered a fractured skull at a protest in Oakland on Tuesday night.

Two veterans groups say that a protester who was badly wounded in Oakland on Tuesday night is a former marine who is now hospitalized with a fractured skull.

According to Iraq Veterans Against the War, the protester, Scott Olsen, is a member of their group who left the Marines in 2010, after serving two tours in Iraq. In a statement, the group’s executive director Jose Vasquez, claimed that Mr. Olsen “sustained a skull fracture after being shot in the head with a police projectile while peacefully participating in an Occupy Oakland march,” on Tuesday night. Mr. Vasquez added that Mr. Olsen, a systems network administrator in Daly City, Calif. “is currently sedated at a local hospital awaiting examination by a neurosurgeon.”

A series of bloody photographs that appear to show Mr. Olsen after he was wounded were posted on the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center’s site, Indybay.org. Those images show that Mr. Olsen was wearing a brown military shirt with his last name on the front. Jay Finneburgh, the photographer who shot the images of Mr. Olsen, wrote on Indybay: “This poor guy was right behind me when he was hit in the head with a police projectile. He went down hard and did not get up. The bright light in the second shot is from a flash-bang grenade that went off a few feet from us. He looks like he might be a veteran. he was eventually taken to highland hospital.”

Aaron Glantz of The Bay Citizen, a news site in California affiliated with The Times, reports:

As of noon Wednesday, Olsen, 24, remained in critical condition at Highland Hospital in Oakland. A handful of friends, many of whom are also veterans of the Iraq war, stood vigil outside the emergency room door.

They said they had been informed by nurses that he was still unconscious. Aaron Hinde, an Iraq war veteran who, like Olsen is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, said Olsen was brought to the hospital by “two good Samaritans” around 8pm Tuesday evening and lost consciousness on the way to the hospital.

“I think its terrible for him to go two tours in Iraq and exercise his rights that he fought so hard to defend and get a serious injury like this,” said his roommate Keith Shannon, who served alongside Olsen in the Marines in Iraq.

An Oakland police officer told The Bay Citizen that the police department is investigating a use of force incident that caused serious injuries, but that it may not be O.P.D. who was responsible.

Mr. Olsen was also a member of another group, Veterans For Peace, according to Mike Ferner, that organization’s director. A short time ago, Mr. Ferner wrote in a blog post on the Veterans For Peace Web site, he spoke with another member of the group, Josh Sheperd, who was present at the chaotic protest. Mr. Shepherd — who can be seen in photographs and video of the protest standing between the protesters and police officers in his Navy uniform, holding a white and black flag and a copy of the Constitution — also said that Mr. Olsen “was struck in the head with some sort of projectile,” suffered a skull fracture and is now in “stable but serious” condition at a local hospital.

Mr. Ferner also pointed to this video, shot during the protest, which seems to show, 23 seconds in, a brief glimpse of someone suddenly collapsing to the ground after projectiles were thrown or fired into the crowd of protesters.

As we mentioned in our 2:24 p.m. update, the footage above appears to have been filmed in the same location and just before the video of Mr. Olsen being carried away from the scene, which suggests that it might contain a brief glimpse of the moment he was hit.

The post on the Veterans For Peace site also includes information from Mr. Shepherd on what happened just before Mr. Olsen was injured.

I just got off the phone with V.F.P. Chapter 69 member, Josh Sheperd, who was at 14th and Broadway in Oakland early this morning and witnessed much of what happened.

Josh said that after receiving several text messages with news of the Oakland PD taking down tents and arresting people, he decided to go to downtown Oakland and “see if, as a V.F.P. member, I could help still the anger… to be between the police and the protesters… it seemed unconscionable to me that the police use the cover of darkness like that to do what they were doing.”

He got to the front of the crowd and said he “felt a lot of tension in the air.” Shortly thereafter a barrage of “less than lethal” ordnance, tear gas, bean bags and flash-bangs was fired. He and the people he was with took off, regrouped, marched through part of downtown and returned to 14th and Broadway.

There, he went to the front of the crowd immediately, waving the V.F.P. flag. He said the crowd seemed considerably calmer. “It might be just my impression, but there seemed to be a considerable desire for peace and the crowd expressed that.”

Next, the Oakland PD issued the “you’re going to get arrested if you don’t leave” warning. Shortly after that, Josh said, “People in the rear of the crowd threw eggs at the police and that was the O.P.D.’s cue to fire another barrage.”

In that barrage, V.F.P. and I.V.A.W. member Scott Olsen was struck in the head with some sort of projectile and was severely injured. Josh reports that Scott was admitted to hospital and has a fractured skull. His condition is stable but serious.

All 53 protesters arrested on Wednesday morning in Atlanta were released on bond, our colleague Robbie Brown reports. He adds:

They were charged with violating a city ordinance against being in Woodruff Park after 11 p.m. and have to return to court in March.

The mayor, Kasim Reed, has become a real target of the protesters. They call him “Mayor Greed” and chant “hey hey, ho ho, Mayor Reed has got to go.” They’ve been marching with cardboard signs with the mayor’s phone number on them.

“This is a continuation of the civil rights movement,” said Ron Allen, one of the protest organizers. “Mayor Reed could not even be the mayor of Atlanta if it weren’t for past protests.”

“Mayor Reed has turned into Bull Connor Reed,” he added, invoking one of the villains of the civil rights era. “He is a tool of corporations.”

On Tuesday, a man showed up at the protest with an automatic weapon. Some say it was an AK-47, some say an AKM-14. The mayor said this was a tipping point in his decision to arrest the protesters.

Most protesters say the armed man was not part of the movement. “I’ve been here since Day 1 and I’d never seen him,” said Candi Cunard, 26, an artist. “He’s not with us. It makes us look aggressive. We don’t even know that guy. He could have come in with a specific purpose of giving us a bad name.”

But others defended the armed man. “I understand the concerns that anyone could have with him walking around with an automatic weapon. At the same time, he has the right to do it and it’s legal in the state of Georgia. He’s part of the Occupation,” said Latron Price, 37, president of a civil rights movement, the Joe Beasley Foundation.

On Wednesday, the Anglican bishop of London, Richard Chartres, told the protesters to go home, The Associated Press reported. He said that while they had had “raised a number of very important questions” it was time “for the protesters to leave, before the camp’s presence threatens to eclipse entirely the issues that it was set up to address.” The protesters have vowed to stay despite the bishop’s suggestion. The group also took issue with a report from The Daily Telegraph which claimed, based on thermal imaging, that 90 percent of their tents were empty.

The A.P. has also produced a round up of other developments at Occupy protests. In Baltimore, protesters were negotiating over terms that would allow them to stay in a downtown plaza, though perhaps as a smaller group; in Albuquerque, the police arrested a dozen people for constructing a campsite at the University of New Mexico; in Denver, protesters returned with blankets and vowed to brave an expected snowfall this week in the same park where the police tore down a camp last week.

Protest organizers are hoping to turn out tens of thousands of people on Saturday in a second day of global demonstrations in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. This latest call for a global day of protest comes the editors of Adbusters, a Canadian anticorporate magazine which dreamed up the idea of a movement called Occupy Wall Street back and set Sept. 17 as the date for the start of the protest in Lower Manhattan back in July.

As the Lede reported last week, the magazine is attempting to push the “leaderless people-powered movement for democracy” which was “inspired by the Egyptian Tahrir Square uprising and the Spanish acampadas,” toward a concrete goal: demanding the imposition of a so-called Robin Hood tax on financial transactions. In support of that idea, they have called for worldwide protests on Saturday, Oct. 29, days before world leaders gather for the next Group of 20 summit meeting in Cannes, France.

“As the movement matures, let’s consider a response to our critics,” the magazine’s editors wrote in a “tactical briefing” released this month. “Let’s occupy the core of our global system. Let’s dethrone the greed that defines this new century. Let’s work to define our one great demand.”

As Adam Gabbat reports for The Guardian, a video analysis by a blogger named Matt Kresling suggests that an explosive projectile tossed at protesters in Oakland from behind police lines on Tuesday night might have been thrown by an officer. Mr. Kresling has slowed down footage originally shot and posted online by KTVU, a Fox news station in Oakland, and added narration to make his case.

Near the end, Mr. Kresling’s edit also includes some of the video discussed in our 1:55 p.m. update, which appears to have been recorded at about the same time as the KTVU footage, from another angle, and shows a man identified as Scott Olsen, an injured veteran, being carried away from the scene.

The KTVU footage and the video of Mr. Olsen shot by Ali Winston, a radio reporter, seem to show different parts of the same incident, from different angles. In both clips, a Walgreens can be seen in the background, as can Joshua Shepherd, a member of the group Veterans for Peace who wore a Navy uniform and held a white flag aloft near the police line as mayhem unfolded around him.

Although Oakland’s police department insisted that its officers did not use stun grenades, activists and journalists have been pouring over video shot on Tuesday night to see if there is any evidence that such munitions were used. Another Guardian journalist, Paul Harris, discovered video posted on YouTube six months ago in which a police officer from a SWAT team demonstrates how such the “less than lethal” munitions are used. The brief clip, which was uploaded by a video blogger in Colorado, gives a good sense of the kind of flash and loud bang stun grenades produce.

Thanks to a reader who pointed out in the comment thread below that KTVU also posted some clear overhead footage of the police firing munitions at protesters, shot from a helicopter.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Winston said the videos were shot at roughly 7:45 p.m. local time at the corner of 14th Street and Broadway, just in front of City Hall. He said that the front line included police officers from nearby jurisdictions who had were there to assist the Oakland police in crowd control.

The sound in the clip below is a frightening mix of booms and squeals as tear gas canisters fly in the air and spin on the ground. “At the beginning of that video, that’s the sound of the gas canister releasing and spinning around,” Mr. Winston said. [Warning: the clip contains some strong language.]

At the end of the video, protesters carry a man — dazed, bleeding from the head and wearing what appeared to be fatigues — away from the police line where the gas was thickest. “We were all coughing up a lung,” Mr. Winston said.

He spoke to another man nearby, who identified himself as a former sailor named Joshua Shepherd and a member of Veterans for Peace. Mr. Shepherd said that the injured man was a former service member named Scott Olsen. Mr. Winston included that information when he posted the clip to YouTube. (The Veterans for Peace Twitter feed includes a link to a photograph of Mr. Shepherd at the scene on Tuesday night, holding the organization’s flag aloft.)

In another clip, Mr. Winston said the click that can be heard “is the sound of nonlethal projectiles.”

“I didn’t see the rounds,” he added. “What I do know is that I saw nonlethal projectiles being used and many, many, many, many flash grenades.” As The Lede reported earlier, the Oakland Police Department has denied using flash grenades, saying their non-lethal crowd control methods were limited to tear gas and bean bag rounds.

The police attributed the loud bangs and flashes to protesters with heavy firecrackers. Mr. Winston, who said he had been covering the protests since police moved in to clear an encampment from in front of City Hall early Tuesday morning, said that he had seen a “couple M-80s” explode in the morning, but added: “There were absolutely no firecrackers there last night.”

Hazy images of scattering crowds and gas-filled Oakland streets may have called to mind scenes from recent protests in Greece and the Middle East. But while rare, the use of tear gas by police departments across the United States is certainly not unheard of.

The Oakland police have used tear gas to disperse large crowds of protesters on at least one other occasion in recent years. In January 2009, the police fired tear gas when a demonstration over the killing by a transit officer of a young man named Oscar Grant turned violent, with some 100 people smashing windows of local businesses and settings cars on fire.

The year before, during the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, the police fired flash grenades and gas at protesters. (Marta Costello, a video blogger, shot raw video of the scene.) The police were later questioned over their tactics, as The Times reported:

Although most of the demonstrations were peaceful, small groups of masked figures smashed windows, attacked a police car and knocked an officer to the ground on the first day of the convention. Ultimately, more than 800 people, including about two dozen credentialed journalists, were arrested. Dozens more were handcuffed and photographed without being accused of any crime. And police officers in some instances used pepper spray, tear gas, bullets made of plastic and foam and flash grenades that exploded with a burst of light and a sharp bang.

The police also frequently use tear gas as a method for driving dangerous subjects out of hiding places, and corrections officers have relied on it to subdue rioting prisoners.

Video shot by an activist shows police officers moving in to clear Occupy Atlanta protesters from a park in the city early on Wednesday.

In Atlanta, 53 protesters were arrested as the park they were camping in was cleared by police overnight. Mayor Kasim Reed explained why in a phone interview this morning with our colleague Abby Goodnough. “I made the decision that this protest was not being conducted in a manner that was consistent with the history of Atlanta’s protests,” Mr. Reed said. “Candidly, these individuals were moving toward a more significant event to attract more and more attention. They had misread my desire to give voice to the frustration of people, some of whom have very legitimate concerns, and believed that we would allow lawlessness and anything to happen.”

Our colleague Robbie Brown reports from the Atlanta Municipal Courthouse, where the 53 arrested protesters are being charged with violating city ordinances for refusing to leave Woodruff Park:

Even the protesters agreed that the arrests were relatively calm. They say some police were too aggressive but for the most part, it was civil.

But they say they are still disappointed that in Atlanta, nicknamed the Cradle of the Civil Rights Movement, there would be such intolerance for civil disobedience.

“Compared to other cities, Atlanta has a long history of peaceful movements. There was no rioting. There was no burning. It was just a transparent, honest movement,” said Latron Price, 37, the president of a civil rights group, the Joe Beasley Foundation, who was among the protesters who chose not to be arrested. “Here you have the birthplace of the King movement. You have an African-American mayor who comes from a civil rights background. He should support this movement.”

Rob Price, 23, one of the protesters and an intern at the A.C.L.U., said he chose not to be arrested. Dozens of protesters stepped out of the park and avoided arrest.

“I stayed in the park as long as I thought would be reasonable. When things got out of hand, I stepped out.”

After his visit to the park on Oct. 7, Mr. Lewis told reporters that the movement’s growing pains reminded him of his experience as the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s.

A photograph posted on the Occupy Atlanta Web site on Wednesday appears to show the protester who had objected to allowing Mr. Lewis to speak earlier this month being arrested this morning.

As The Lede reported earlier, protesters in Oakland claimed that police officers fired flash grenades at them on Tuesday night. The Oakland Police Department denied using flash grenades and said in a statement: “The loud noises that were heard originated from M-80 explosives thrown at police by protesters.”

However video recorded by KTVU, a Fox news station in Oakland, appears to clearly show that at least one projectile was launched at protesters from behind police lines moments before an explosion. The KTVU clip was edited and slowed down by a video blogger who posted this version on YouTube:

Readers who might have any more information about this incident, like video recorded from another angle, are encouraged to contact us.

What's Next

About

The Lede is a blog that remixes national and international news stories -- adding information gleaned from the Web or gathered through original reporting -- to supplement articles in The New York Times and draw readers in to the global conversation about the news taking place online.

Readers are encouraged to take part in the blogging by using the comments threads to suggest links to relevant material elsewhere on the Web or by submitting eyewitness accounts, photographs or video of news events. Read more.

Six young Iranians were arrested and forced to repent on state television Tuesday for the grievous offense of proclaiming themselves to be “Happy in Tehran,” in a homemade music video they posted on YouTube.Read more…